“My DVD drive is not operating properly. It can play music CDs but when it plays DVDs the video and the sound are distorted.” It was my customer’s complaint about his Toshiba Satellite L25-S1215 laptop.
The following laptop troubleshooting steps helped me to fix the problem. The laptop booted to Windows pretty fast without any errors, with a normal hard drive sound and spinning CPU fan. I restarted the laptop couple times and didn’t notice anything abnormal. I tested the optical drive with a generic data CD and a DVD movie. The drive recognized the data CD and all files on it but refused to play the DVD correctly. The video and sound output from the DVD movie was choppy, skipping scenes. It looked like a defective DVD drive and I ordered a replacement from Toshiba under warranty. I was pretty sure that a new DVD drive will fix the problem, but it didn’t. After I replaced the DVD drive the same problem occurred right away. The laptop had 256MB memory installed and 64MB were reserved for the video memory. I blamed a lack of memory and installed an extra 512MB memory stick and it didn’t help either. My guess about a corrupted video driver was wrong too because after I downloaded and reinstalled the driver the DVD video still was distorted. In cased like this, when we are not sure what is causing the problem the software or the hardware, we always install a test hard drive and reload the original factory software. I installed a test HDD and reloaded Toshiba Satellite L25 restore CD. After that the problem with a distorted video and audio output was fixed and I was able to play the movie for 2 hours without errors. Most likely, the problem with playing DVD occurred because of corrupted software.
If you have a similar problem with your laptop, do not rush to replace the DVD drive. Backup the important data and run a restore CD, it might fix your problem.
Related posts:
Toshiba Satellite M45 laptop freezes up after playing a DVD movie for about 30 minutes to an hour
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January 18th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Melinda Wyles,
If you purchased this laptop less then 1 year ago, it still should be covered by Toshiba warranty. Call Toshiba and find out your warranty status or you can check it here.
January 18th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
I have a problem with my Toshiba Laptop!
I started it up like normal, and it didn’t boot all the way up. There was a line through the screen and the letters were jumbled. Is there anyway to fix it? Will Toshiba replace it if not? It is only about a year old.
September 4th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
A question in regards to toshi l25. Mostly directed to pete. I uninstalled the secondary IDE controller from within Device Manager and rebooted. It said “new device found cd dvd etc”, but never installed. Am i to find the restore disc and put that in the drive…A little confused I cant find the original restore disc, and now it shows no cd/dvd drive in My Computer. No sound plays at all either. A little help please
August 31st, 2006 at 12:19 am
Lyn,
Try booting the laptop from any bootable CD or DVD. If the laptop boots fine, then it might be a software issue and it will not be covered under warranty. In this case you can backup all important information from the hard drive and after that re-image the hard drive. Start the laptop from the recovery CD/DVD and follow the wizard. BACKUP the hard drive before you re-image the drive!!!
If the laptop will not boot form a bootable CD, then you might have a bad optical drive. The replacement should be covered under Toshiba warranty.
Sometimes it happens because of a loose connection between the drive and the motherboard and reseating the drive can fix the problem.
Check out my previous post about disappeared CD-ROM drive.
August 30th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
My Toshiba Satellite wont recognise it has a dvd/cd player in the My Computer menu. I can put in a dvd and the light flashes but nothing happens. I have done System Restore without success and rolled back the driver but it said I already had the best driver. It is under warranty so probably my next option…
Any ideas?
Lyn
August 20th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
claude ranupas,
What is your laptop, is it Toshiba?
Usually you can reinstall a missing driver from a recovery CD/DVD disk. When you open it up, you should see a menu that allows reinstalling the driver.
The second option would be to download it from the manufacturer website.
August 19th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
By mistake I deeleted the sound program in the add/remove program/controlpanel.
Now I don not have any sound at all I can not find the hardware name for the sound device it shows “unknown” and therefore I can not find the driver PLEASE HELP!
PLEASE
August 11th, 2006 at 1:53 am
Hello, I’m a Microsoft certified technician stationed in Great Falls, MT. I have located a solution to this problem, dealing with the TS-L642C model drive. You need to upgrade the firmware on the drive itself to eliminate this problem. Visit this site and select the “TG00″ version to download. Then download the frashing application here . Create a shortcut to this flashing application, with a space and a “-nocheck” (with the “) after it. Execute the flashing app via the shortcut, select the downloaded firmware from the first link, and ignore any prompts about the software being “older”. Select the “start download” button at the top left corner of the flashing app, and your good to go after a quick restart.
August 4th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
If the dvd player is distorted on sound and image quality,try increasing the video ram,add 32mb and that should help,but it will reduce memory to the computer processor which will be 64mb,so if you have 256 it will only show 192 after the update,go to the toshiba downloads site and install the bio vid update,it was listed for my s1216 series,hope this may help
May 7th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Rob,
Do you login to your laptop as an administrator? If you are logged in as an admin, you shouldn’t have a problem when you restore the driver. Have you tried the Roll Back Driver option? I believe it’s available only in Windows XP.
In the device manager locate display adapters. Right click on an available adapter and open properties. On the driver tag you’ll find Roll Back Driver. If you click on this button the video driver would be reverted to the previous installed version.
On the Toshiba website you should be able to find the video driver for your laptop.
BTW, I do not sell any laptop parts.